Rafe McGregor

Francis Hutcheson is generally accepted as producing the first systematic study of aesthetics, in the first treatise of An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, initially published in 1725. His theory reflected the eighteenth century concern with beauty rather than art, and has drawn accusations of vagueness since the first critical response, by Charles Louis DeVillete in 1750. The most serious critique concerns the idea of beauty itself: whether it was simple or complex, and the idea of a primary or secondary quality. It is the latter question I shall answer, attempting to clarify the problematic passage that appears at the end of the first section of Hutcheson’s first treatise.

To Protect and Serve is Norm Stamper’s second book, following Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing (2005), and is a welcome contribution to the debate between those who advocate violence against the police and those who insist that no reform is necessary. Radley Balko’s The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2013) inadvertently provided the context of the civil unrest in Ferguson ignited by the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 and the controversy surrounding the “Ferguson effect” provides the context for Stamper’s treatise on the problems faced – and caused – by contemporary U.S. law enforcement. Stamper is one of the few senior police officers singled out for praise by Balko, for the most part on the basis of his activism against police prejudice and militarisation subsequent to his retirement as Seattle’s police chief in 2000.

In this paper I propose a new argument for moderate autonomism. I call this the ‘critical argument’ to distinguish it from the empirical argument of James C. Anderson and Jeffrey T. Dean, and the no-error argument of James Harold. My strategy is to first employ the criticism of Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis to demonstrate the moralist failure to account for the complexity of the relationship between literature and morality, and then offer a more promising alternative. I set out the autonomist, moralist, and immoralist positions in the value interaction debate in §1, and identify problems with classifying the two critics in contemporary terms. In §2 I discuss Arnold’s cultural criticism as both a part of – and a reaction to – the public moralist tradition that dominated Britain in the nineteenth century, drawing attention to his criterion of ‘seriousness’. §3 examines Leavis’ literary criticism, focusing on his conception of the relationship between composition and life, and his criterion of ‘maturity’. Drawing on the similarities between Arnold and Leavis, I demonstrate that their concern with morality differs from that of the contemporary moralists in §4. In §5 I employ John Gibson’s distinction between normative and informative values to complete the argument for moderate autonomism. I test my argument against an extreme case, a hypothetical literary equivalent to The Birth of a Nation, in §6, and conclude that moderate autonomism provides the most compelling solution to the value interaction debate.

This article demonstrates that Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) meets both conditions of Paisley Livingston's bold thesis of cinema as philosophy. I delineate my argument in terms of Aaron Smuts's clarifications of Livingston's conditions. The results condition, which is concerned with the nature of the philosophical content, is developed in relation to Berys Gaut's conception of narrational confirmation, which I designate ‘experiential affirmation.’ Because experiential affirmation is a function of cinematic depiction, it meets Livingston's means condition, which is concerned with the capacities of the medium or art form. I address two objections to my argument and conclude with a brief commentary on the implications for the broader relationship between film and philosophy

Lynn Turner’s research focuses on the significance of species and sexual difference in culture and philosophy and her current work is especially concerned with the relationship between human and non-human animals. The Animal Question in Deconstruction is an exploration of this relationship in eleven essays, eight of which are new, two previously-published (in Nicholas Royle’s The Uncanny [2003] and Kelly Oliver’s Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment [2013]), and one of which appears for the first time in English (‘Un Réfugié’ by Hélène Cixous, initially published in L’Amour du loup et autres remords in 2003).

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that narrative representations can provide knowledge in virtue of their narrativity, regardless of their truth value. I set out the question in section 1, distinguishing narrative cognitivism from aesthetic cognitivism and narrative representations from non-narrative representations. Sections 2 and 3 argue that exemplary narratives can provide lucid phenomenological knowledge, which appears to meet both the epistemic and narrativity criteria for the narrative cognitivist thesis. In section 4, I turn to non-narrative representation, focusing on lyric poetry as presenting a disjunctive objection: either lucid phenomenological knowledge can be reduced to identification and fails to meet the epistemic criterion, or lucid phenomenological knowledge is provided in virtue of aesthetic properties and fails to meet the narrativity criterion. I address both of these problems in sections 5 and 6, and I close with a tentative suggestion as to how my argument for narrative c..

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies originates from ‘A Dangerous Liaison? The Analytic Engagement with Continental Philosophy’, a conference held at the University of York on 9th December 2011 courtesy of the support of The Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society, and the Humanities Research Centre. There were four invited speakers, each with a respondent, and two graduate speakers, with papers presented by four of the six article authors in this volume. The aim of the conference was to promote cross-pollination between the two traditions of philosophy, with the emphasis on what analytic philosophers could gain from engaging with phenomenology and hermeneutics. The conference was bookended by two excellent broadcasts on the relationship under scrutiny: Stephen Mulhall, Béatrice Han-Pile, and Hans-Johann Glock were interviewed on BBC Radio 4 in a programme of In Our Time entitled ‘The Continental-Analytic Split’ on 10th November; and the Philosophy Bites podcast for 18th December was ‘Brian Leiter on The Analytic/Continental Distinction’.

The War on Cops is a collection of previously-published essays by Heather Mac Donald, a public intellectual in the United States who belongs to the ‘small faction’ of secular conservatives (Mark Oppenheimer, “A Place on the Right for a Few Godless Conservatives”, New York Times, February 18, 2011). The essays are journalistic rather than academic, having appeared in the City Journal, National Review, New York Daily News, InsideSources, Wall Street Journal, and Weekly Standard, but the volume is nonetheless significant to contemporary philosophers due to both its form and content. First, Mac Donald presents a logical argument for her position and makes explicit use of philosophical devices such as thought experiments. Second, this argument concerns the controversy surrounding the killing of African American males by police officers in the last three years and she provides the first sustained criticism of the rationale for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, the issue of collaboration with the Third Reich became particularly problematic for deconstructive criticism. The distinction between collaboration and cooperation is often far from clear, however, and in borderline cases the opacity of the motives behind the alleged collaboration may be such that retrospective historical judgements run the risk of appearing arbitrary. In contrast, the decision to remain silent about alleged collaboration can – and should – invite negative moral judgement. On the one hand silence offers evidence of deceit; on the other, silence speaks of an absence of regret or remorse; and in the case with which this paper is primarily concerned, silence is indicative of both deceit and remorselessness.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the experience of a literary narrative qua literary narrative is an experience of narrative thickness, that is, an experience in which narrative form and narrative content are inseparable. I explain my thesis of poetic thickness in § 1, showing why it does not admit of extension from poetry to literary narratives. §§ 2–3 synthesize the work of Derek Attridge and Peter Lamarque, advancing narrative thickness as a necessary condition of literary narratives. I propose a work of didactic literature – J. M. Coetzee’s ‘The Lives of Animals’ – as a paradigmatic counterexample to narrative thickness in § 4. I show, in § 5, that narrative thickness holds for this work in particular and didactic works which are literary in general, concluding that narrative thickness is indeed a necessary condition of literary narratives

In this paper, I shall demonstrate the value of the concept of literary thickness – i.e. form-content inseparability – as a tool of literary appreciation. I set out the relationships between non-fiction, fiction, literature, and poetry in Section 1 and sketch a preliminary definition of literary thickness in Section 2. I argue that a convincing account of reference in literary fictions can be provided by means of literary thickness in Sections 3 and 4. I argue that the match between authorial intention and reader response characteristic of the experience of literary works is explained by literary thickness in Section 5. In Section 6, I test the usefulness of the concept of literary thickness against Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang.

The purpose of this article is to show that the value interaction debate is deeply flawed and constitutes a superficial analysis of the relationship between morality and art. I introduce the debate, which concerns whether a moral defect in a work of art is an aesthetic defect, in Section 1. Section 2 establishes the vagueness of two key terms in the discussion, _moral defects_ and _aesthetic defects_. In Section 3, I introduce the naive assumption-uninteresting claim disjunction, identifying five of the six approaches as demonstrating a fundamental naivety about the relationship between morality and narrative art. I show, in Section 4, that four of the six are philosophically uninteresting as they offer an incomplete—and ultimately unsatisfactory—explanation of this relationship. In Section 5, I discuss the quantity and quality of examples employed in the debate, many of which are non-canonical, and some of which are entirely inappropriate. I conclude by recommending a reorientation of the debate to focus on the underlying question of whether the characteristically artistic value is finally or instrumentally valuable

The purpose of this paper is to twofold: to identify the problem of cinematic imagination, and then to propose a satisfactory solution. In §1 I analyse the respective claims of Dominic McIver Lopes and Roger Scruton, both of whom question the scope for imagination in film – when compared to other art forms – on the basis of its perceptual character. In order to address these concerns I develop a hybrid of Gregory Currie’s model of cinematic imagination and Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe in §2. §3 offers a reply to Lopes and Scruton, examining the problem in terms of the tension between the normativity of films as props and the employment of the creative imagination by audiences. I conclude with a solution that admits of two incompatible conceptions of cinematic imagination.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense theory offers a satisfactory account of moral perception. I introduce Hutcheson’s work in §1 and indicate why the existence of a sixth sense is not implausible. I provide a summary of Robert Cowan and Robert Audi’s respective theories of evaluative perception in §2, identifying three problematic objections: the Directness Objection to Cowan’s ethical perception and the aesthetic and perceptual model objections to Audi’s moral perception. §3 examines Hutcheson’s moral sense theory, focusing on his discussion of benevolence, the desire for the happiness of others. I deal with the unresolved issues in Hutcheson’s account by recourse to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary perspective on the moral sense in §4, arguing for the moral sense as the second-order faculty for judging benevolence. I return, in §5, to the objections, showing that moral sense theory solves all three problems and therefore offers a satisfactory account of moral perception

The purpose of this essay is to argue that Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott, 2007) has cognitive value which is inseparable from its value as a work of cinema.  I introduce the cinematic philosophy debate in §1.  §2 sets out my position: that the Final Cut affirms the proposition there is no necessary relation between humanity and human beings.  I outline the combination of cinematic depiction with distinctive features of the narrative’s peripeteia in §3.  In §4, I explain the cognitive value of the peripeteia.